CHAPTER 19, MURDER MOST ELITE

Chapter 19 in MURDER MOST  ELITE is now presented, good and faithful readers.  And  I am happy first  to present for your ongoing reading pleasure
                                            
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And now the second installment of MURDER MOST ELITE:

                                                                  CHAPTER 19

Shock and awe hit all of us in the A Group upon grasping the unknown history of the Newbold case when Amy Gilreath dropped her bombshell.  We had assumed, quite wrongly, that the narrative confession had been part of the court record at the trial.  Not so.  Amy told us that after the trial, she had seen the trial transcript at the Fairfax County courthouse, typed on 8/12 x 11 inch white bond paper.  But in 1982, ten years after the trial, when again she viewed the transcript at the courthouse, she immediately realized that it was not the original transcript she had seen in 1972.  She blew our minds with the fact that in her first transcript viewing there was no mention of an Exhibit 2, the narrative confession.  Typed on crisp, white bond paper, in the upper left-hand corner, an entirely new document was labeled as Exhibit 2, dated May 3, 1972, the date of the trial.

It was only in reading the longer, new version that Amy finally realized the true source of extraordinary exploits attributed to Steve by the media, especially the bizarre life-risking swim over the Potomac River from Maryland to Virginia.

For so many years, she and the family had thought that the intense media descriptions had been purely imaginary on the part of cheap attention-seeking news  reporters.  Now the Gilreaths knew that the only possible major sources who had fed, i.e. leaked, damaging disinformation to the media were law enforcement officers.  Cops.   

Amy was flabbergasted that Exhibit 2 was never introduced as evidence at the trial, even though everyone at the courthouse would claim later that it had always been public information, but the Gilreath family, Steve's lawyers, as well as their paralegal staff, knew that was not true. 

Someone went to a lot of trouble to set up the appearance of Steve's having a legitimate interview with officer Robert LaClair, one that the stenographer then typed as Gilreath's testimony, and that this document bore Steve's signature, though we knew it was actually a facsimile only, a  convenient forgery.  We understood  the full significance of one vital factor now more than ever to be carefully considered.  From childhood, Steve Gilreath had readily confessed to acts he had not committed, and under stress, he would admit to anything "to get it over with," in his own words.  He was destined to repeat this reflex, a destructive habit in any frightening situation, such as when he was accused of abduction and attempted rape.

From our studies of the "confessor" type, we knew that innocent people come forward and confess to crimes, often violent crimes, which they did not commit.  Law enforcement officials all over the world deal with this type of behavior every day, which is one excellent reason why corroborative evidence is  required to validate any confession.  

Also, hostile Fairfax County police had harassed Jim Gilreath for one full year, claiming in public without evidence that both Jim and Steve were juvenile delinquents.  Police authorities could have as easily tracked Steve as they had been able to track Jim, to know what Steve looked like and the license number of his Volkswagen.  To apprehend Steve in McLean, which was close enough to the Madeira School  so as to make his presence near there look suspicious, proved to be a piece of outstanding good luck for the prosecution. 

Even a timid, nervous person like Steve should have some memory of a narrative confession of such great magnitude, especially one that landed him in jail.  However, he had no memory of the text of Exhibit 2.

The chances are slim that even an expert investigator could not conduct a three-plus-hours-long confession given the difficulty Steve had always had in articulating his thoughts .  The English language was his Achilles Heel; he often found it difficult to speak under trying conditions.  It would have been a near impossibility for him to knock off a detailed, lengthy coherent narrative in a one-half-hour session.

How best to construct the Newbold case for the A Group now lay before me.  I began with two assumptions.

ASSUMPTION 1.  Steve Gilreath did not give the narrative confession, Exhibit 2.

I cited numerous contradictions and inconsistencies, plus the forgery of his name.  I also included Mrs. Amy Gilreath's experience: that there was no Exhibit 2 presented in the court trial.  The only paper Steve signed in court was a  14" x 8 1/2 " pre-typewritten admission of guilt, titled PLEA OF GUILTY TO A FELONY, like the one he had signed previously in Harrington's office many months before the trial as a requirement for Horan's plea bargain, which Harrington promised was a "good deal." Steve signed another one, presumably, in court,  also signed by Paul H. Harrington, Jr.   At this point perhaps everyone was expected to accept this second  pre-typewritten form as Exhibit 2, a cover for the genuine, but hidden narrative.

Had the text of Exhibit 2 been revealed in court, Steve would have immediately changed his plea to not guilty, then fired Pat Harrington on the spot.

 Officer Robert  LaClair required no special training to know that an utterly incoherent confession was that of an habitual confessor who also gives the impression of being a mental defective.  And that the situation should have been referred to his superior officer, who probably would release this suspect immediately. 

The matter about what the subject of this confession wore was easy to fathom.   On  page five of the  narrative,  Steve  is quoted as saying that he removed  his clothing "At the rock which both of us, the girl and I, were located." 

Question: In other words, you swam the river fully clothed?

Answer: No, I swam the river in the loin cloth so my clothing wouldn't get wet.

Question:  You said that you were clothed in a loin cloth type outfit about your waist?

Answer:  Yes, an orange towel.

Steve then is quoted as saying that he threw the towel somewhere in the river.  "I threw it in when I was finished with it, when I reached the Virginia side."

This meant he was naked  during the entire time he was with the Newbold girl.  Yet her testimony is that he wore a towel.  This construct alone renders this narrative invalid to the degree that it should have been thrown out  at once by the judge.  And there was one paramount point that we A Group analysts took very seriously:  The confession must be accepted as is, no one may interpolate, i.e.,  either add or subtract, any statement, not even one word from the text.  No one.  We are not allowed to dwell on what a person might have done, or could have thought. No. We must accept that the subject of this narrative was naked, regardless of what Ms. Newbold claimed in court.  One need not accept that a young girl in her position did not  notice that her alleged rapist was naked, and not wearing an orange towel around him.  Thus her credibility is completely damaged, to the extent that the entire confession is invalid. 

ASSUMPTION 2.  Steve Gilreath gave LaClair the confession. 

If he did so, it was from a loss of reality  caused by a psychosis.  But even however mild and temporary the psychosis might have been, of which he had no memory, he could not be held responsible for the contents since key statements and assertions were obviously untrue, which officer LaClair should have easily determined.

How, I asked myself,  did Exhibit 2 get placed into the official court record ?  Some sleight-of-hand maneuver unseen by the onlookers could have taken place at the trial.  But if that confession had been entered, any average defense attorney could have and would have immediately challenged its veracity, exposing it as totally without foundation.

Harrington did not contact Dr. Carleton Smith at NOVA Community College to retrieve the test paper written at exactly the same time and on the same day Ms. Newbold accused Steve of abduction.  That test paper would have proved Steve not guilty.  We know that Steve got an A  on that test.

Trial Judge William Plummer's sending Steve to The Psychiatric Institute in Washington, D.C. instead of  jail for twenty years suggests that Plummer read the narrative and concluded that  Steve was some kind of mental case.  The only information that could possibly have given him reason to believe that Steve was mentally ill lay in the knowledge that Steve was seeing a psychiatrist.  The fact was that the psychiatric hospital Steve was sent to for evaluation in Virginia found him not  mentally ill.

Judge Plummer must have believed that the narrative confession was invalid, given its obvious legal defects.  If invalid, it would then require Plummer to acquit Steve, to let him go free.  Instead, Plummer delivered a guilty verdict without valid corroborating evidence, directly opposite to logical judicial practice.

Also, Judge Plummer tried Steve Gilreath on the charge of attempted rape, though prosecutor Joseph Howard had dropped this charge, from the moment Plummer let Howard, with no objection from Pat Harrington, ask Lori Newbold to describe the physical acts that happened at the rock in the Potomac.  Plummer failed to remind the lawyers that the attempted rape charge had been dropped and therefore no testimony  on that subject could properly be included in the record.  Further, the judge must have known that the charge should have been filed in the jurisdiction of Montgomery County, Maryland.  As a result of these judicial errors, it was always mistakenly assumed that Steve was found guilty of attempted rape, which was never true.

 In his first and only meeting with Steve, Harrington persuaded his client to accept Horan's plea bargain and sign a typewritten statement of guilt.  He rhapsodized about what a "good deal" it was, and told Steve "That's the way these things are always done."  

Harrington knew that Steve had an alibi.  Amy Gilreath mailed Steve's mechanical engineering test paper to Harrington, who ignored it.  Harrington did not argue that Steve should have had an attorney present when LaClair questioned him.  Nor did he ever contact Steve's therapist, Dr. Sobotka.  Nor did Harrington ever question Lori Newbold as to her identifying Steve.  The police photos taken of Steve were never entered into evidence.

After the judge found Steve guilty, Harrington requested a pre-sentence investigation and report before the judge sentenced Steve.  Plummer agreed, then read aloud from a report from the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.  He noted a number of  previous "incidents" including one in March 1970, another in Maryland, and one indecent exposure and assault case.  None of these charges were true, but Harrington claimed in court that he knew about the indecent exposure incident.  I wondered where he got that information.

Given the top secret status assigned to the pre-sentence report, it must contain valuable information about Steve Gilreath because statements attributed to it have been cranked into his official records for over thirty years according to Amy Gilreath.  Yet the Virginia correction system's staff  counselors refuse to show it to Steve or his family.

We learned a fascinating coda to the Newbold trial: Lori Gayle Newbold asked Gilreath's probation officer, Paul Folliard, for a private meeting with him and Steve.  Folliard turned down her request, leaving open the question of exactly what she wanted.  Did she want to tell them she knew Steve was not guilty, that she was too embarrassed and under too much pressure to tell the truth earlier in court?

I asked the A Group for their question of witnesses on the narrative question.  The fact was that officer LaClair was the only witness, though there were two lines for witnesses to sign their names on.  So why didn't the stenographer, Penny A. Hardin, sign on the second line?  I ask these questions because there was also a line with the date and place for a signature of a notary public.  But there was no notary public to view the signings, an omission for which there was no excuse in a well functioning police department intent on securing an important confession. 

The nine-page confession took exactly one half hour to obtain, yet it took three hours to transcribe.  Why?  And in the most unprofessional police procedure, throughout the confession the subject's name was misspelled on every page.  So at the end, I had more questions to ask, with no answers easily forthcoming.

The A Group noted Amy's well connected friends in the Republican Party could have recommended a top-drawer defense lawyer, who undoubtedly would have called Carleton Smith as a defense witness, and destroyed Lori's testimony.  That would have prevented the false narrative confession from surreptitiously being introduced as evidence after the trial.  Not one of the many candidates Amy had helped become elected officials offered to help insure that her son was treated fairly under law.

Fate stepped in to hand  Steve Gilreath a severe legal challenge on October 29, 1973 when Natalia Parker (Tasha) Semler, a 14-year old freshman student at the Madeira School,  died of exhaustion while tied to a tree in the school's nearby woods.

Gilreath was immediately suspect in her untimely death.  He was convicted of murder-by-imprisonment in May of 1974, and sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years.


                                            Your obedient servant,

                                             Boz